Almost every recent survey about the Indonesian presidential election agrees that incumbent Joko Widodo is comfortably ahead of his rival Prabowo Subianto in the run-up to the April 17 vote, with slight variations as to how big the lead is (most put Jokowi at least 15% ahead).
But, according to the Prabowo campaign’s own internal survey, all of those polling organizations are way, way off. In fact, they claim their data shows Prabowo and his running mate Sandiaga Uno ahead by an even bigger margin than Jokowi and his running mate Ma’ruf Amin are winning by in all those “external” surveys.
“Based on our internal survey, Prabowo’s electability is at 62% while Jokowi’s is 38%,” Prabowo Campaign Director Sugiono told reporters yesterday, as quoted by CNN Indonesia.
Sugiono did not provide any details about their internal survey, such as when it was taken and what its confidence level is, other than that it involved 1,440 randomly selected participants. He also acknowledged that there was not a single undecided voter in their sample pool, even though most polls put that figure at around 15%.
Sugiono said their campaign initially did not intend to make their internal survey public, but felt the need to in order to counter the general perception that Jokowi is going to win as predicted by most polls.
“We feel there’s an information imbalance among the public that [Prabowo is] always below [Jokowi]. We don’t want there to be misleading information for the masses,” he said.
Conversely, Jokowi’s campaign has never even mentioned the existence of their internal survey, let alone released one. Perhaps they’re not under any pressure to due to their comfortable lead in most independent polls.
